~ Hockey for Fans and Players of Color

Maame Biney becomes first black female U.S. Olympic speedskater

We interrupt this hockey blog to give a Color of Hockey big shout-out to Maame Biney, who became the first African-American woman to make the U.S. Olympic speedskating team.

The 17-year-old short track skater from Reston, Virginia, punched her ticket to PyeongChang, South Korea, in February with a dominating performance at the U.S. Olympic trials over the weekend in Kerns, Utah.

While she’s the first African-American woman to make the U.S. Olympic speedskating team, African-American women have an illustrious history of participation in other Winter Games sports.

Vonetta Flowers was the first African-American athlete to win an Olympic gold medal when her two-person bobsled finished first at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Debi Thomas captured a bronze medal at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in figure skating. The 2014 women’s Olympic bobsled team that competed in Sochi, Russia, featured fiveblack women. The 2018 team could be mostly minorityas well.

Biney began speedskating at age 6 after she was told she was too fast for figure skating. She’s an alum of the Fort Dupont Kids on Ice Speedskating, a Washington, D.C. program that was conducted at one of the few ice skating rinks in the United States located in a largely African-American neighborhood.

According to her Team USA bio, she wants to be a chemical engineer. She said that if she could have any super-power it would be the ability to freeze time.

Apparently, she already has the ability to crush it.

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